Fassbinder's first international production, based on a Nabokov novel wittily adapted by Tom Stoppard, Despair is worth rediscovering, and not least for Dirk Bogarde's sublimely dry performance as a man quite literally beside himself in Berlin in the early 1930s. Hermann, the Russian émigré owner of a chocolate factory, begins experiencing dissociative episodes. And as he sits and watches himself, he is not particularly amused. Not only can Hermann read the political writing on the wall-he sees piles of cast-off little chocolate men-but his beloved if idiotic wife Lydia (Andrea Ferreol) is inexplicably having an affair with her ridiculous cousin Ardalion (Volker Spengler), a struggling artist who is a thinly veiled conformist. Adopting a vagrant as his doppelgänger, Hermann (much like the country around him) embarks on a murder/suicide scheme through which he plans to truly dissociate. Stoppard's sarcasm is surprisingly apt Fassbinder material: as with chocolates so with life-one can never tell if it is too bitter or not bitter enough, as one searches for the soft center.